Noir Fiction: Money, Sex, and Revenge

In the city, two young members of rival street gangs meet in a basement for a game of Russian roulette, a “Smith & Wesson .38 Police Special” set on the table between them. In rural Maine, a disgruntled neighbor murders his enemy and turns him into a scarecrow, leaving him “drying—slowly, slowly in the wind.” And in the suburbs, small animals are turning up dead, finished off “by clean edged rectangular stab wounds.” These bulletins from a world gone mad are just some of the dark pleasures to be found in “The Best American Noir of the Century,” a new anthology edited by James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, which features short stories from an eclectic list of writers that includes Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, and Elmore Leonard.

In his introduction to the book, Ellroy writes that noir “indicts the other subgenres of the hard-boiled school as sissified, and canonizes the inherent human urge toward self-destruction.” Noir as an idea and a mood may be familiar to us from its prominent, and easily parodied, place in cinema—the rich black-and-white cinematography, the tough talking dicks and sultry dames, the lines of cigarette smoke that run to the ceiling. But what characterizes the style in fiction? And is there a difference between noir writing and detective or mystery fiction? Last month, I asked Penzler—a writer, editor, and owner of the legendary Mysterious Bookshop in New York—to shed some light on noir.

“Most mystery fiction focusses on the detective, and noir fiction focusses on the villain,” Penzler explained when we met in midtown Manhattan. “The people in noir fiction are dark and doomed—they are losers, they are pessimistic, they are hopeless. If you have a private eye, the private eye is a hero; and he’s going to solve the crime and the bad guy will be caught. That’s a happy ending, but that’s not a noir ending.”

No heroes and no happy endings. Penzler writes in a foreword to the anthology about “the lost characters in noir who are caught in the inescapable prisons of their own construction.” Think of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” or the loveless lovers in James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” or of all that fatalistic doom in Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men.” It’s always the bad guys and gals that stand out. They may, like several of Poe’s more deviant characters, feel the urge to confess, either to prove their demented genius to the world, or to have their outcast urges punished and perhaps corrected. Or, they may just be too dumb, sex-crazed, or down on their luck to pull of their crimes. But there’s a thrill in reading these stories—in the artful plots, the often baroque style, and the thick air of desperation.

Andrew Pepper, in an essay published in “The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction,” identifies the central themes of noir: “the corrosive effects of money, the meaninglessness and absurdity of existence, anxieties about masculinity and the bureaucratization of public life, a fascination with the grotesque and a flirtation with, and rejection of, Freudian psychoanalysis.” Camus cited noir as an influence, but this American crime version of existentialism is less rigorous, more vague, like the mumbling of some low-rent hood. Take Evan Hunter’s “The Last Spin,” wherein one of those Russian roulette players twirls the barrel of the gun, and before pulling the trigger, sums it all up: “What the hell’s the difference?”

Noir characters stand alone, outside of civility and outside of society. “Nobody in noir fiction has a mother, nobody has children, nobody has someone that they love and care about. They live by themselves, for themselves.” Cut off from the longstanding values of the human family, these characters turn to immediate desires.

“Noir is about sex and money, and sometimes about revenge,” Penzler told me. These three elements often fuse into a frenzied craving that leads to half-cooked plots doomed to failure. And what about all the sex, and the prominence of the soulless woman, the femme fatale? Ellroy puts it best in the introduction: “This society grants women a unique power to seduce and destroy. A six-week chronology from first kiss to gas chamber is common in noir.” Many have observed, with good reason, that women are misused by the mostly male writers of the genre. The men may be bad, but the woman are often very bad, and often no more than projections of male desire.

“Yes they are sexual objects, and yes they are dominant,” Penzler said. “Noir fiction was written by men for men. There are exceptions to everything; Patricia Highsmith was written for nobody—for everybody and nobody at the same time; and Dorothy B. Hughes is a wonderful noir writer. But if you look at a kind of literature where the bad girl is the heart of the story, well, those women are not very likable in general.”

Noir fiction came out of the First World War and the Depression but still thrives today, in slightly altered form. Early on it was often produced for the low-paying pulp presses, which valued speed and volume from its writers, leading to uneven output even from the most talented artists. “In recent years, the writing has just gotten so much stronger,” Penzler told me. Indeed, much of the anthology is dedicated to noir writing from the past thirty years, stories from authors such as Dennis Lehane and Chris Adrian, who was recently included in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list of best young American writers.

What accounts for the lasting popularity of such dark tales?

“Have you ever lifted up a rock and seen slugs and millipedes and other ugly creatures come out?” Penzler asked me. “We like to watch them.”